Spent a long while Sunday evening watching and then watching again (and again) the Joffrey Ballet’s recreation of Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s 1913 “The Rite of Spring”.
You owe it to yourself to watch this ballet. Really, you do. All the way through. You’ll not be disappointed. It’s wonderful.
This portion of a recent interpretation of it does absolutely nothing for me but it has 71,474 views and has 13 pages of comments whereas the Joffrey Ballet’s recreation has 6887 views for the first part (half that for the other parts) and not near as many comments. Perhaps people still have a problem with the foot stomping, chaotic angularity of the style of dance of the original (the recreation was based on preserved notes). My guess is it has more to do with that than the women removing their underwear at the beginning of the recent interpretation. If the women had removed their underwear then proceeded to pigeon-toed stomp I don’t think the video would have over 71,000 views. No, they remove their underwear then everyone dances like they’re in Westside Story, which seems to be a winning combination.
H.o.p. was briefly perplexed because he associates “The Rite of Spring” with “Fantasia”.
Poor kid.
I can barely tolerate “Fantasia”. He loves it. There’s nothing quite like dinosaurs battling it out to Stravinsky.
So, he loves Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and he heard it playing and came up to watch what was going on. I explained to him that, no, Disney’s “Fantasia” was not what Stravinsky had composed the music for. This took him aback a second. Then, after watching a few minutes of the Joffrey, he volunteered he liked the ballet, he thought the dancing was great. And I think he did enjoy it.
I was inspired to look up at Amazon Nijinsky’s diary, which he kept for six weeks, at the very premature end of his career, before his admittance to an asylum for schizophrenia at age thirty. It looks interesting and I’ll probably purchase it…
But first, a new monitor. Mine–this horrid Dell–which is only two years old now but has long had problems, is finally dying. I can no longer cut it off as it’s developed a habit of flashing when I cut it back on. You can knock it, hit it, bang it, jostle cords, and still it continues to flash to black at least a couple times a second, and though it does eventually stop and permits me to get to work, no doubt tomorrow or the next day it will no longer come on it all. Which is why I’m no longer cutting it off. So I spent this week doing some research and narrowed my choice of replacement down to two true 8-bit lower midrange monitors for about $450 through NewEgg and finally decided to go with the NEC. I promised myself I’d have one purchased by Friday night, but it’s Monday and I’ve yet to plunk down the money. Today. I’ll do it today.
H.o.p.’s monitor is dying as well these past three months. You have to hit the screen HARD every thirty minutes or so to knock it out of these hallucinogenic, acid rock background film fits that it falls into. But at least it responds to a thwack.
OK. I just plunked down the money for the new monitor. Because I do art and photo processing, I do NOT like the fact it’s silver. I hate purchasing something where I already don’t like something about it, but the black was only available in Open Box so that wasn’t an option, and besides, the black had a silver bezel so what’s the point. I also could kick myself for not getting the rush processing for $2.99. I looked at it and thought, with two days delivery do I need rush processing? No. I looked at it again and thought why not get rush processing for $2.99, but decided no after sitting there for another couple of minutes staring at the screen, because I’d already spent $50 extra for a replacement plan. “So, you’ve spent $50 extra for a replacement plan. Why not spend a paltry $2.99 extra for rush processing?” I said to myself, and STILL I didn’t purchase the rush processing. Then after I complete the order I see that it will take up to 48 hours for them to process. So, with the holiday weekend I’ll not likely see my monitor until the beginning of next week. I hope this one holds out that long.
One day I’ll have a LaCie.
Leave a Reply